Final Fan Mail

Here’s another message full of questions from my fan, the fellow who signs himself Eddie Murcks Jr. (possibly a pseudonym).

Question: Hi, bozo. How did you rate this Tour de France for excitement? Me, I give it about a six on a scale of one to ten.

Answer: That’s Mr. Bozo to you, chum. But I agree with you. At times, many times now that I think about it, this Tour had the electric crackle of a tractor pull. As the saying goes, the riders make the race and for many stages they didn’t. Sky was too intimidating. (Did you see the textbook way they reeled in the Voigt break on the Champs-Elysees and set up a train for Mark Cavendish?)

And the design of many stages discouraged enterprise. Teams of pack fill like Argos-Shimano, Vacansoleil and Saur-Sojasun clogged the roads.

Question: Who most disappointed you?

Answer: Denis Menchov and his Katusha teammates. Some days I thought they had all pulled out of the race in a feed zone and nobody noticed. Ditto Lampre, Orica-GreenEdge, Omega Pharma–Quick-Step, and AG2R La Mondiale. Also, in a way, Vincenzo Nibali. Although Eddy Merckx (not a pseudonym) respected his chances for overall victory and I respect Eddy Merckx, Nibali didn’t often ride like a man seeking overall victory. The third step on the podium seemed to be the limit of his ambition.

As for Cadel Evans, age seems to have caught up to him. In fairness, who, except for Tejay van Garderen, was his support in the mountains? Why did BMC send its Paris-Roubaix squad to the Tour?

Question: Who most impressed you?

Answer: Peter Sagan, Thomas Voeckler, Jens Voigt, Luis Leon Sanchez, Chris Horner, Thibaut Pinot, Andre Greipel and everybody in a Sky jersey. Garmin gets points too for battling on despite heavy toll in crashes. Credit RadioShack for winning the team competition, hard to do without a leader and with chaos in the home office. That’s not to forget Europcar, whose riders won three stages and the mountain jersey while being dogged by incessant speculation that the French team is the target of a doping investigation.

And a special hand, please, for Cavendish, who plugged away in the mountains to Paris to build his condition for the Olympic road race, won three stages and even managed occasionally to fetch water bottles for his teammates—a duty not often performed by anybody in the rainbow jersey.

Question: You’ve had some mean things to say about the French, at least the Parisians. Isn’t there any room in your heart for them?

Answer: Of course there is. Just out my kitchen window, where I spend a lot of time washing dishes and preparing meals, I’ve been watching a domestic drama for a month. The couple across the street on the first floor—same as mine although it’s actually the second floor; the French don’t count the ground floor as the first—have had a baby, a boy because he’s decked out in blue. Several times a day, the couple take the baby out on their small balcony for an airing and swivel him around. He’s so tiny and unknowing while gazing out at this ferocious world. I’m sure that his parents are telling him: It can be yours for the taking, kid. That’s what I told my children. So I certainly like these French people. For the 55 million others, after four decades here, it depends on circumstances.

Question: Latest thoughts about Lance Armstrong?

Answer: Let USADA or a court or arbitrators try to sort it out. What I do know is that this Tour de France missed Armstrong and all his appetite and gusto. In word and deed, he knew how to make a race come alive. But, boy, did he make work for me.

He was, as an editor of mine at The New York Times once assured me, the only story for Americans. “Americans” were defined by him as primarily even-higher editors at The Times.

“He’s all they care about,” the editor said. “They ask us every day why you’re not telling us how Armstrong is doing.”

My answer was that, in that particular Tour, Armstrong was not doing anything. Except for the prologue and the team trime trial, both of which I had written about as Armstrong triumphs, he was content to be a face in the crowd. This was known as team strategy, I explained. There was no need for him to do anything heroic in the race until it reached the mountains, nearly two weeks away. Until then, he was simply pedalling.

“Well,” he said, “The AP makes it sound much more important than you do.”

I could only agree. The Associated Press could take the most meaningless fact—Armstrong finished a daily stage in 41st place among the 188 riders—and give it significance simply by reporting that fact in the start of its article.

That the statistic was valueless—if the riders finish in a long, unbroken line, they all are credited with the same time, and so 41st place is as good as fourth or 188th—was often left unsaid or snuggled away far down in the article. If there was a mass crash and a few riders broke bones while Armstrong scraped a knee, the AP article would invariably begin, “Lance Armstrong was injured today as….”

Editors in the United States, mine anyway, responded to this slant: “You’ve got to match the AP,” I was often told. I replied that I was covering the entire race, not uniquely Armstrong. So, occasionally, a passing reference to him in my copy was moved much higher and amplified by the desk in New York. Irrelevant details, cribbed from guess where, were inserted as, now and again, my writing was treated with the same tenderness a strip miner shows a coal seam in Appalachia.

Question: To repeat, what do you think about the charges against Armstrong?

Question: Why are soigneurs rarely stationed now at the top of each big climb to give out newspapers for riders to stuff into their jerseys as windbreaks on the descent? We used to see this much more in years past.

Answer: Print media are so yesterday. Speaking of which, after three decades of writing about the Tour for newspapers, it’s been liberating and lots more fun working on the Internet. Thanks for inventing it, Al Gore.

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